An Unhooked Thinking look at how addiction and relationship go together

We may sing endless songs about it, but love is a force we can’t explain, even though we know what it is when we experience it.

When we don’t have it, we tend to be unhappier than when we do have it; we tend to forget we ever knew it.

When we’re in a state of love, the world is good; it wraps us in confidence and light.

When we love, our being has purpose; we know why we’re here.

Love is open, tender, giving, generous, peaceful and so many other adjectives. It needs no defending.

The Chinese character denoting love is made up of other symbols: one for a heart in the middle, between signs for ‘accept’ at the top, and ‘feel’, or ‘perceive’ at the bottom.

Bertrand Russell described love as an absolute value.

It cannot be reduced, however hard neurochemists may try.

To be in love with someone is to have a relationship with them. To be in love is see ourselves in the mirror of the other, to see our baggage in the rosiest tints.

But it is also to be ecstatic, which gives the mirror that pink colour. Some of us would like to be in love all the time. We also use the word to pick out those experiences that particularly turn us on, from “I love Marmite”, through “I love being stoned”, to “I love sex”.

Indeed being in love with someone else often leads to an erotic experience we adore.

Neuroscientists don’t want to be left out of this discussion. They’ve found that when people testify to feeling love, there are bucket-loads of testosterone, oestrogen, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin in their brains.

To be in love is to be high. To be in love with someone who is in love with you is a double amplification of the most rhapsodic human experience.

Trouble is we get confused about love, so badly do we want it. All those neurochemicals make it hard to distinguish love from lust, need, want, greed and other malfunctions of the self.

When I first fixed heroin it was very like falling vein over needle in love. The morphic high apparently freed me from carrying the baggage of my self. I was ecstatically what I wanted to be.

I had a new purpose: to continue this love affair. I wanted more. I couldn’t stop. All symptoms of addiction.

Mystical love is the true absolute value; it transcends the self and its baggage, it is beyond space, time and the self. It is therefore the opposite of addiction, which, in the end, is an obsessive clinging to an illusion of one’s self being in love.

At first heroin freed me from my unhappiness, and in that release I could love what I saw of myself in its mirror. But what I saw was an illusion.

Our worldly love is a stepped-down form of mystical love, maybe all we can take while absorbed in the world. The more it is stepped-down, the more we confuse it with something we can possess, the closer we get to addiction.

The theme of Unhooked Thinking 2007 (May 9-11, 2007, Bath Guildhall) is Love and Baggage.

It’s our baggage – our frustrations, depressions, misaligned expectations and neurochemical misappropriations – that turns love into the dust of need.

Addiction and mystical love are the two most powerful relationships we can experience, at opposite ends of the continuum of humanity – addiction is a prison, love is liberation.
At Unhooked Thinking 2007 we’ll examine the connections between love, conflict, relationship and family. We’ll be talking about how we can unhook our thinking about addiction from the clichés of medicine and criminal justice; we’ll be thinking about the role of love in the treatment of addiction; we’ll be rummaging in our baggage to see what we can let go.

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© William Pryor

William Pryor is Director of Unhooked Thinking, the addiction conference.
http://www.unhookedthinking.com

He is author of the book Survival of the Coolest: A Darwin's Death Defying Journey into the Interior of Addiction